You can now play Fortnite on your iPhone with a MFi (Made for iOS) controller such as the SteelSeries Nimbus or the SteelSeries Stratus XL, and that’s a pretty big deal. The standard touch controls worked well enough when you were playing against other iPhone players, but they made you a walking target when you joined friends who were playing on the Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, or PC. True controller support, though, gives you a fighting chance.

It works so well, in fact, that this could be a landmark moment in mobile gaming. We’ve had MFi controllers for years, of course, but rarely have they been put to such good use and for such a noteworthy property. Now that anyone can play the world’s most popular video game on an iPhone as easily as they can play it on the Switch or the Xbox, other studios might be tempted to release ports for current games to the iPhone as well.

The team at Aspyr certainly understands their Civ. While I had my attention focused elsewhere, they advanced so far down their technology tree that they managed to stuff a game as complex as Civilization VI on the iPhone and make it look as though it belonged there all along. If this were a game of Civ, I would have figured such a feat would have taken them a few more turns.

After all, it was only a little over a year ago when my jaw dropped at the sight of Civilization VI running on an iPad; its complex mouse-and-keyboard controls brilliantly translated to Apple’s language of taps and swipes. But that’s the little leagues compared to what I’m seeing here. I can build empires on the subway. I can usher in great ages of science on the sidewalk to work. And for the most part, at least with my iPhone XS Max, I’m preferring this version over its counterparts on larger-screened devices.

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GamingGamesSoftwareReigns: Game of Thrones preview: Who knew the best Game of Thrones game would be so simple?Thu, 23 Aug 2018 09:16:00 -0700Leif JohnsonLeif Johnson

I swiped right for Daenerys Targaryen. This isn’t Tinder (although I would have swiped right for her in that case, too); it’s the upcoming iOS and Mac game Reigns: Game of Thrones, set for release sometime in October. In this case I’m swiping right to send her off to help Jon Snow slay the undead horde with her Texas-sized dragon, and I see no reason to worry. At last, after so long, she’s on the Iron Throne. She has what she wants in her grasp, and I figure it’s safe to ignore the whimpering cautions of Tyrion Lannister. But her long saga comes to an end barely moments after, her newborn reign cut short by a gruesome mishap on my part.

Martin Jonasson, the creator of the popular ricochet game Holedown, says that the usual business of “freemium” games like cooldowns and consumables rubs him the wrong way. He acknowledges that some games implement free-to-play monetization systems well, but he’s turned off by how they force him to serve “multiple masters.”

“You can’t only focus on making the player’s experience positive [under that model]; you have to ensure there’s some money trickling in as well,” he tells me. “That’s a concern I’m happy to avoid.”

Focusing on the experience alone has paid off. Holedown only costs $3.99, but it’s simple and endlessly entertaining. It isn’t hard: Its main challenges deal with learning how to aim and collecting enough crystals to shoot more balls at once and move on to even deeper planets. It’s a “delightful spectacle of bouncing,” in Jonasson’s own words, and I see no reason to dispute them. It relaxes more than it frustrates, in large part because there’s rarely any question that your failures spring from your own mistakes rather than resisting subtle pushes to cash shops.

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GamingGamesiPhoneiPadiOSmacOS Mojave lets you use an eGPU with a MacBook Pro display. And the gaming boost can be fantasticMon, 06 Aug 2018 04:00:00 -0700Leif JohnsonLeif Johnson

As of the latest public beta patch for macOS Mojave, eGPU support for the Mac is truly worth getting excited about. Back when I first covered Mac eGPU support, I noted that it came with one significant drawback: You could only see its benefits through an external monitor. Fortunately, that’s no longer the case. Apple now lets you accelerate graphics directly on the display of a MacBook Pro or iMac, and even more impressively, it lets you easily choose which apps will benefit from that acceleration.

The general process of hooking up an eGPU hasn’t changed much. All you need to do is have a compatible graphics card (which will almost always be AMD, as Nvidia cards still aren’t supported) and an eGPU enclosure to put it in. From there, you just plug the eGPU into your Mac through the Thunderbolt 3 port (which means this only works on Macs made within the last couple of years). Your Mac will immediately recognize the eGPU. There’s no need to install specific drivers or restart your Mac. Overall, it’s a good example of the elegant simplicity we expect from Apple.

Shortly after work yesterday I strolled out of my office and found a bunch of zombies loitering around the San Francisco Ferry Building. This being San Francisco, I was tempted to live and let, well, unlive.

I had obligations, though, so I fired a pistol on the lot of them. Blam, a headshot there. Boom, another in the back. I even tossed in a grenade for good measure. And right as I prepared to shoot the final one, I gasped as a real-world teenager skated into the line of fire.

He’s fine, of course. This isn’t the real world, or at least not really: It’s The Walking Dead: Our World: Next Games’ new free-to-play augmented reality game in the vein of Pokémon Go.

Multiplayer games are on a roll lately. By now you probably already know about Hammond, the adorable hamster who rolls about in an iron wrecking ball of death in Overwatch (and whom we tried out in a recent PCWorld Twitch stream). But as for me? I find I can’t stop thinking about Guild Wars 2’s Roller Beetles, which rolled out in the patch for GW2’s "Long Live the Lich" patch last week.

Ride one, and you’ll probably feel the same way. They’re the sixth mount in the newish Path of Fire expansion following the existing Raptors, Griffons, and the like, but they’re also likely the best mount I’ve ever ridden in an MMORPG.

I love the stories from the first days of Pokémon Go: the tales of shut-ins venturing out into parks and public spaces to find not only Charmanders and Bulbasaurs but sometimes new real-life friends who shared their passions. At its best, early Pokémon Go lent truth to the phrase “augmented reality,” as people found their local corner stores or libraries became “PokéStops” for replenishing the supplies needed to play. In an age when people bark at others for staring at screens rather than faces, Niantic’s game managed to blaze a middle road.

But me? I spent those halcyon days on a remote and dusty South Texas ranch, hunting Pokémon of my own through swaths of skin-ripping mesquite beneath a 100-degree sun. Or trying to, anyway. Half an hour would go by before I found something to toss a ball at, and when such a thing would appear, it was almost always a near-worthless Rattata or Pidgey.

Well, you might recall that we originally said that we were going to try out the Steam Link for this week’s Apple Arcade, but it looks like that's not happening. Thus far, it hasn’t been released for iOS, and we haven’t received beta access. So we’ll shoot for next week.

This week we’ll instead head to the land of the elves. Specifically, we’ll be running about the lush islands in The Elder Scrolls Online’s new Summerset expansion, which entered early access for Mac and PC preorderers today, and which will fully go live on June 5. We’ll have a review ready for you then—and you might recall I’ve already written a preview.

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GamingMacsMacBooksHow to play PC games on iPhone or iPad with the Steam Link app: Apple Arcade episode 9Fri, 18 May 2018 06:00:00 -0700Leif JohnsonLeif Johnson

Barely a month ago the idea of playing a game like The Witcher III on your iPhone would have been unthinkable (and indeed, it’s so resource-demanding that it’s yet to be ported to the Mac). But that will change quite soon, at least in a roundabout way.

Valve’s Steam Link app is coming soon to iOS within the next handful of days, and it dropped for Android users on Thursday. (Word on the street is that the iOS version is still tied up in Apple’s approval process.) The idea behind this wonderful app is that you can stream games directly from your PC or Mac directly to your iPhone or iPad, essentially turning them into portable gaming devices like the Nintendo Switch. And it works directly through the app, so you don’t even need the $50 Steam Link device Valve sells for streaming from a PC to a TV.

We didn’t have an Apple Arcade video last week due to a couple of scheduling conflicts, but I took the time to hop in with Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery for iOS and post my thoughts about it. I, ahem, didn’t like it. There’s a clear love of J.K. Rowling’s universe in developer Portkey’s new game, but it’s walled behind an obnoxious free-to-play design that repeatedly asks you to plunk down money to advance unless you want to wait a couple of hours to keep playing.

This, of course, is standard fare with free-to-play games on iOS, but Hogwarts Mystery feels particularly punishing. Once I got past the introduction, I’d barely start playing for a few minutes on the train to work before I’d be slapped with a request for more gems to advance the story further without waiting for the energy to recharge. Worse, the gems are pretty expensive, which means you could easily end up spending more money on this than you would on a so-called “AAA” game with a single $60 price like the new God of War.

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery for iOS reminds me of my grad school. It’s not just because of the gothic spires or the intellectual combativeness of the students, and it’s not even because our dining hall was modeled on the same Oxford dining hall that served as the Great Hall in the films. No, instead it’s because I’m reminded at every turn that the place wants me to cough up some cash.

Developer Portkey’s new game is a free-to-play adventure that Death Eaters would be proud of. It’s free-to-play of the old, money-grubbing variety; the kind that makes you suffer through hours of waiting if you don’t drop five bucks or more to bypass it all. Had I succumbed to Hogwarts Mystery’s every single request for cash to further the adventure, I doubtless would have already spent enough cash to buy a proper blockbuster game like the new God of War for the PS4. Had I played through the upcoming weekend that way, I probably could have spent enough to cover a student loan payment.

The first chap I meet in the Summerset Isles is an elf with a Sean Penn face who gripes about how he’s missing out on a wine tasting because some local Wood Elves “offed” the vintner, because of course. This, after all, is the closed beta for The Elder Scrolls Online’s Summerset expansion ($40 on Amazon), which whisks us off to the ancestral homes of the High Elves, a magical land crammed with haughty wizards, Neuschwanstein-like villas, and flora that likely would have been at home in Eden. Whatever. This dude just wants his wine, and I can appreciate that.

Folks with more coding knowledge than I have (and a greater willingness to potentially brick a $2,400 machine) have been hooking up external graphics cards to Macs for years, but the support now come bundled into macOS 10.13.4 High Sierra. In layman’s terms, Apple officially supports some graphics cards that you’d normally only find in a bulky PC tower—so long as you have a separate external chassis to stick them in and a Mac with Thunderbolt 3.

I hoped eGPU support would be revolutionary. Beyond that, I hoped it’d allow me to break with PCs entirely, as I really only use them for gaming these days. Anyone who watches Apple Arcade knows I’ve been a little frustrated with the current state of Mac gaming, and an external graphics card struck me as an easy way to circumvent the limitations of Apple’s built-in processors.

Not too long ago, running a graphically intensive game like Rise of the Tomb Raider at 60fps on a humble MacBook seemed about as likely as Steve Jobs faking his death. With macOS High Sierra, though, it’s a reality.

Apple’s latest update brought official support for external graphics processing units, which means you can now hook up a high-powered PC graphics card to your Mac and experience breathtaking textures and shadows on a machine that could barely boot the game a few minutes before. It’s potentially revolutionary, but as with so many features like this that we see from Apple, you’ll have to steel yourself for a boatload of complications.

Apple is ahead of the curve in many fields, but gaming simply isn’t one of them. Take Crystal Dynamics’ beautiful and exciting Rise of the Tomb Raider. Lara Croft’s latest adventure launched on Xbox consoles all the way back in 2015 (and a PC release followed in January of 2016), but it won’t be making its Mac debut until Thursday, April 12. Better late than never, I guess.

If you’re wary of slapping down $60 for it on Steam or $30 on the App Store, you'll want to tune in to Apple Arcade on Thursday at 2 p.m. Pacific. We will be on hand to show you how well Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration performs on a 2017 15-inch MacBook Pro. It’s an absolutely gorgeous game on PC, which unfortunately means it’s probably going to struggle a bit on Apple’s line of desktop machines, even with its support for Apple’s Metal 2 API.

Apple’s cozy chats about the new 9.7-inch iPad making its way into classrooms focus heavily on affordability, privacy, and quizzing software. But let’s admit it: Many students are going to be spending a lot more time in class playing Fortnite than scribbling out notes with their fancy new Apple Pencils.

In fact, Tim Cook said next to nothing about games on the new iPad while on the stage in Chicago last week, but that’s why we’re here at Apple Arcade.

Apple claims the new tablet delivers “40 percent faster CPU and 50 percent faster graphics performance” over the previous 9.7-inch iPad, so on Tuesday afternoon we’ll see what that means in practice. We’ll tackle performance-demanding games like Fortnite, PUBG Mobile, and Civilization VI. We’ll peek at iPad favorites like The Witness and Thumper. We’ll even spare a bit of time for augmented reality games like ARise and AR Dragon.

At this point two weeks ago, neither Fortnite: Battle Royale nor PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds were on the iPhone or iPad in the U.S., but now both wildly popular games are fighting for our attention and downloads. Join us on Tuesday for our Apple Arcade show at 11 a.m. Pacific when we’ll play both games live and decide which one we love the most.

As you may recall, we’ve already played a bit of the beta for Fortnite: Battle Royale on iPad and iPhone and shared our impressions of the experience (along with some footage). On Tuesday, we’ll play both Fortnite and PUBG back-to-back and see in real-time how their controls and performance compare.

It hasn’t even been a fortnight since we learned that Fortnite: Battle Royale, Epic Games’ wildly popular multiplayer survival shooter, would be coming to iOS, and yet now it’s already on my iPhone and iPad, running far more smoothly than I’d expect from a freshly-minted beta. Only a comparatively small group of players currently have access, but what I’ve seen so far suggests that Epic wouldn’t have to do much to fling open the gates to the wider public. (You can sign up for the beta here.)

You want to know about Fortnite Battle Royale on iOS. I want to know about Fortnite Battle Royale on iOS. And if you don’t think you do, consider that Fortnite’s popularity is such that Epic Games’ beta sign-up page crashed hard for well over an hour this morning, so crazy was the flood of people wanting to sign up. Make no mistake: If we happen to get a code within the next couple of hours, we’re totally going to devote our show to Fortnite tomorrow.

But if that doesn’t happen, have no fear! We’ve got some other cool stuff in store when we go live tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific! We received an invite to the alpha for World of Warcraft’s upcoming Battle for Azeroth expansion last weekend, so co-host Dan Masaoka and I will hop in and showcase its current performance on both a 2017 MacBook Pro and an iMac. We’ll also do a general hands-on with some of the popular MMO’s new features, which includes two new continents, new races, and new PvP "warfronts" inspired by real-time strategy games.

Mac gaming is no longer in quite the sorry shape it was in the days before Apple started using Intel chips, but game developers clearly still think of it as an afterthought. Truth is, if you really want to play the best new PC games on a Mac, it’s often better just to partition a bit of your hard drive for Windows (through a virtual machine like Parallels) or to stream games from another system. Waiting for a Mac port is like waiting for George R.R. Martin to finish A Song of Ice and Fire.

As we shared last year, few streaming apps pull this off quite so neatly as Nvidia’s GeForce Now, as the service hosts entire PC games you own on Nvidia’s servers and you simply stream them to your Mac if you have a strong internet connection. You don’t need ridiculously priced GPUs, and you don’t even need a proper PC. Unfortunately, it’s still locked behind a public beta that remains tough to get into.